Born into a small-business family, Brian Postlewait’s passion for helping people led him to the non-profit sector and eventually Vancouver’s Downtown Eastside.
But those entrepreneurial roots still show through.
“I think it’s just in my blood,” he said with a laugh. “You just either know how to do it or you don’t – to get out and hustle.”
With a background in non-profit and community development work, Postlewait became executive director of Christian non-profit Mission Possible in 2007.
“It was an organization in crisis in some ways, because it didn’t have a clear sense of vision,” he said.
With Postlewait at the helm, Mission Possible researched what the community was missing and came up with a simple answer: jobs.
“We have a community in the Downtown Eastside that’s not over-challenged as it’s sometimes looked at; I really believe this is an under-challenged community,” he said. “It’s a neighbourhood that doesn’t know how to move forward and I think people are all the time looking for opportunities to find a foothold and improve their lives.”
In 2008, Mission Possible found an opportunity to launch a graffiti-removal program as part of the City of Vancouver’s pre-Olympic cleanup efforts. That enterprise has expanded into a full-service maintenance business, on course to do $350,000 of work this year.
Postlewait also helped Mission Possible launch a hotel soap-recycling enterprise which employs at-risk women to recycle hotel soaps, which are then shipped worldwide to combat hygiene-related disease. Hotels pay a recycling fee for the service.
Between Mission Possible’s staff and its two social enterprises, the organization has grown from 2.5 staff and $200,000 in revenues in 2007 to 35 employees and $900,000 this year.
“We did that through an economic downturn, so we’re pretty stoked about how we’ve journeyed this far.” •
